RANT: Keyword Spy are comment spammers

That's it! I've had enough! I have tried to bite my tongue but I just can't take it anymore. Time for a bit of public flogging.

In the past 24 hours I have received 2 emails from Keyword Spy to 2 different domains and 2 spam drop comments on two different blogs. Not a week goes by that I don't hear from this company, but the past 24 hours has taken the cake.

Here's a typical email from them:

"It gives us great pleasure to introduce to you KeywordSpy, a search engine tool that generates keywords for ad campaigns in the Internet's most popular search engine sites. KeywordSpy also generates information by using keywords in identifying key competitors that may also be advertising in the same search engine. It is in this light that we humbly request that KeywordSpy be included in your lists of sites that could be used for creating powerful online ad campaigns. It would be interesting to note some of the features our site has to offer: The most comprehensive keyword database with over a billion keywords and counting. Regular updates on keyword databank including search and keywords from our partnership with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and other reliable data servers. 99% percent search results accuracy. Instant downloading capabilities on all search results. Offers exclusive country keywords (US, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia... ZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz

[Thankfully, their spiel was cut off here by our form]

Has anyone else had emails or comment drops from these sock-puppets? Seems they're always from different personas too. I'm beginning to think that SEO Edge and Keyword Spy are related.


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Q and A: How many times can I repeat a keyword before being penalized?

Dear Kalena...

How many times are you allowed to repeat a keyword within the H1, H2, H3... tags before you are penalized for it?

Emily

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Emily

Ah, this old chestnut. Pardon me for saying so, but you're logic is back-to-front. You are making the classic webmaster mistake of trying to engineer your site with search engines in mind. I know I sound like a broken record, but you should ALWAYS design for your audience first and foremost. Search engines, schmearch engines.

As for your Heading tags, there's no harm in using keywords within them, but create the headings so they make the most sense for your site visitors. Headings are ideal for breaking up the text on a page and making it easier to read. But they've got to be comfortable to read too. If you add too much keyword repetition, it will look and read very poorly. As for the keyword penalty threshold, search engines don't publish precise details of their filters but it's a no-brainer that keyword repetition will be picked up, as will excessive heading tags. Personally, I would stick with a single keyword instance per heading and no more than 2 or 3 heading tags per page.

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Q and A: Does Google prefer sub directories over sub domains?

Dear Kalena...

Topweddingsites.com main domain is doing fine in the serps but our state sub domains dropped from page one for all of our top keywords to page 5 and below. Trying to figure out - is it that Google has decided folders are a better way to do a portal like this over sub domains?

Donna

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Donna

As far as I know, Google doesn't have a preference when it comes to sites that use sub directories like http://www.yoursite.com/state/index.htm or sub domains like http://state.yoursite.com. Both versions are indexable. But something to keep in mind is that most search engines only index a certain number of sub levels deep on your site. So, for example, a page like http://www.yoursite.com/state/city/index.htm might get indexed, while http://www.yoursite.com/state/city/region/street/index.htm may not.

The closer your content is to the top level of your site, the more likely it will be found and indexed. It's also widely assumed that content closer to the top level is considered to be more important by Google and given more relevancy weight in Google's ranking algorithm. Many SEO experts insist that sub-domains are more effective than sub directories and rank better too.

As for your situation, I don't think it has anything to do with your use of sub domains. I think it has more to do with the fact that your State pages are all very similar to each other. For example http://ok.topweddingsites.com/ is almost identical to http://mi.topweddingsites.com/. Multiply that by 50 States and you've got yourself a serious duplicate content problem.

In their Webmaster Guidelines, Google specifically states:

"Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content."

My guess is that your State sub domains have tripped a duplicate content filter and have been slapped with a ranking suppression or penalty. If you review Google's definition of duplicate content, you'll see some helpful suggestions for fixing the problem.

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Q and A: Will you review our new SEO tool?

Dear Kalena...

I'm rather hoping this is up your street. After reading your SiteProNews article and looking at your web site I think it is. My name's Chris and I'm a partner in the company TrainStorm Interactive. We've developed a fresh new web-based mutual SEO tool at seorce.com that we think is a novel idea. The tool is free at the moment, and will be cheap to use when it comes out of beta testing compared to other SEO tools/software and hopefully as effective if not more so. Its straightforward operation is fully explained on the site. We're inviting all comers to use the tool and it'd be great if you could come back with some comments or possibly a full review.

Regards,
Chris

Kalena's Answer:

Hello Chris

Thanks for thinking of me to review your SEO tool. I've had a look around the site I'm going to pass thanks. If I did write a review, I'm afraid it wouldn't be favorable because your concept doesn't offer any *real* value, but merely builds fake link popularity, which goes against practically everything in Google's webmaster guidelines. Because it's basically a membership site designed to generate traffic via a voting and points system from visitors in the same network, it's very open to manipulation and is, in my opinion, operating on flawed logic.

This "mutual optimization" idea has been tried before. It doesn't work because it only attracts the most aggressive clickers and the whole thing turns into a competition between 2 or 3 lazy webmasters who think traffic at any cost/quality is the way to run an online business. It's not. Unqualified traffic that's unlikely to convert to sales or sign-ups is only wasting your valuable bandwidth and hosting resources. Visitors that disappear from your site a few seconds after they arrive skew your site metrics and send a message to search engines that your site is not worth visiting. You want traffic from qualified leads, loyal repeat visitors and new visitors via highly targeted search queries.


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Q and A: Why doesn't my new Flash site rank as well as my old non-Flash site?

Dear Kalena...

Hi there - thanks for your fabulous newsletter and advice. I am doing some research on my friend's site, www.nolastudio.com.au (a Flash site). It used to be mosaicmadness.com.au (html site) which now redirects to nolastudio. Since the change, her rankings have dropped. Is this because the new site is Flash? If so, is there a way to optimise a Flash site so it can rank highly again? Any advice will be appreciated :-)

Vlasia

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Vlasia

I've looked at both sites and there are quite a few problems:

1) The old domain has not been redirected to the new one. Both domains are still being indexed by Google. View the Google cache of each domain and you'll see what I mean.

2) It appears both domains are hosted on different IP addresses and Google is treating them as separate sites with different PageRank scores and cache history. This could cause duplicate content problems and your friend should arrange to move both domains to the same IP address as soon as possible.

3) What your friend should have done is to implement 301 redirects from her old page URLs on mosaicmadness.com.au to the replacement pages on nolastudio.com.au. If she still knows the old page URLs she should implement the redirects quickly, before they drop out of the search engine index as non-existent. You can find plenty of posts by me on this blog about how to implement 301 redirects effectively. Click on the 301 redirects label below right for starters.

4) Sites built with Flash are generally not search engine friendly because they consist mainly of graphics and Shockwave files that search engine robots can't "read". If your friend's old site consisted of flat text-based HTML pages, it's no wonder the replacement Flash site is not ranking as well. I called up her page over 10 mins ago and I'm still seeing the [loading...] message! I suggest she implement a non-Flash version of the site as soon as possible and provide a link to this non-Flash version on her new home page. This will ensure visitors who dislike Flash (i.e. most of them) won't grow old waiting to see her content and search engines will be able to index it.

5) As an attempt to optimize a Flash site, somebody has decided it might be a good idea to stuff keywords galore between no embed tags on your friend's home page. They're wrong. Have your friend remove that retro spam from her home page immediately or risk Google engineers wetting themselves from laughter as they pass the site URL amongst themselves one rainy Friday afternoon. It's probably already tripped suppression filters.

6) As a short term fix to ensure your friend doesn't lose any traffic that is still trying to find pages on her old site, she should implement a Custom 404 error page on her domain that explains that she has moved domains and provides the new URL for visitors. Otherwise any persons clicking on outdated page links in the search engines will arrive at a plain 404 error page and likely click away never to return.

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Q and A: Do alt image attributes have an impact on search engine rankings?

Dear Kalena...

I have a question regarding SEO.

How much of an effect if any, do Alt Img Attributes have on search engine rankings? Some articles say Alt Img Attributes have little to no effect on search engine rankings, while other articles say that if used properly they can have a positive effect on search engine rankings.

Can you please shed some light on this debate? I'd really appreciate it,

thanks
Nick

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Nick

The use of Alt Img attributes is important from a usability perspective, more so than any other reason. To ensure vision-impaired visitors (or those browsing with images turned off) can understand what your images represent, they should have alt text associated with them. This is not vital for design-related images, such as borders or spacers, but more so for product images, graphical headings and such. Now, there was a time when the use of Alt attributes contributed to a site's search relevancy. But thanks to abuse by webmasters over the years, the significance of the Atl attribute contribution to the overall ranking algorithm has reduced dramatically and it is also one of the areas search engines look at carefully for evidence of spam.

So what does that mean for persons optimizing their sites? It means you should still use Alt attributes but approach them from a usability perspective and forget any assumed search engine value. For example, if you sell shoes and you have 3 images of different shoes on a page, you should use simple Alt text to describe each in a way that a vision-impaired person could understand: "alt=blue suede shoes", "alt=black leather loafers", "alt=white strappy sandles". The wrong way to approach the same situation would be: "alt=shoes, shoes shoes", "alt=cheap cheap shoes", "alt=best shoes in the world". The first example is descriptive and clear and could also contribute to a page's relevancy for related keyword searches. The latter is non-descriptive, keyword-stuffed and self-promotional. It would be much more likely to trip spam filters.

Hope this helps :-)


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Q and A: Why won't Google index my web page?

Dear Kalena...

Hi, I ran across your blog while searching for help, and I'm wondering if you could answer a question. I made a web page for my wife's photography biz (http://polkaphotos.com). Google last crawled the index page on Oct 29, 2006. I've done some major overhauling to help with search terms, aesthetics, etc.

The site has Flash, but I've run it through a text browser (Lynx) and everything seems to display okay. I've submitted a sitemap, verified through Google. What do I have to do to get Google to go back and re-index the index page?

Michael

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Michael

I've had a look today and the site was last indexed by Googlebot on 13 March so it is being indexed. But I doubt it will rank very well for target keywords. Why? Because apparently your "overhaul" included retro spam tactics that go directly against Google's Webmaster Guidelines!

What on earth made you think that stuffing a web page full of keywords would make it more attractive to search engines or users? Those paragraphs of meaningless keywords at the bottom of the page will do absolutely nothing except attract red flags and ranking penalties from Google, not to mention distracting visitors from your wife's lovely photography.

If you want the site to be taken seriously by both search engines and visitors, I strongly suggest ditching those out-dated spam tactics. Replace them with a paragraph or two of appealing, descriptive text about your wife's photography. You'll find that many of your target keywords will be integrated into the copy naturally, without becoming meaningless, repetitive drivel.
Meanwhile, thanks for providing our Retro Spam Tactic of the Week!

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Q and A: Why can't I see my favicon? (Part Two)

Dear Kalena...

That is not what it was supposed to be -a link farm. It is 6 years of hard link-exchange work. All I know was - that link exchange helps to get attention from the search engines and that was why I started this. I could have done nicer things with my time than sitting night over night to exchange links. After 2 years other websites started asking me to exchange.

For almost a year I would say I haven't answer those requests anymore because I don't know where to put them. But when you say it became a NO NO ...what should I do with my link partners. I also think it is a NO NO to get into a link exchange and throw them out just for the change of a search engine rule. Wasn't it you who said you don't care much about the ever-changing ranking rules of Google ??!!

So what am I supposed to do ....delete all the link pages?! I guess Google did see the point too - my website is a very honest and labour intense result of years of work with tons of interesting content, not only to tourists but also to local people from our community and area. I introduced the power of internet presents to our community and networked like a crazy person. As volunteer by the way!

Maybe that is what Google can detect too, aren't they supposed to see the overall quality instead of some mistakes I might have made? And YES my website is for humans and actually only for humans - that is why I used all those keywords to take it to the people I want to see all our websites.

All comments are highly appreciated.

Thanks
Shirley

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Shirley

If you are proud of the time and effort you've put into collecting the links, then make it a legitimate part of your site! Don't hide it behind meaningless anchor text at the bottom of your pages as though you are ashamed of it.

If the links are all viable and high quality, best thing to do is to create a multiple page travel directory and call it such. There's nothing wrong with a directory of related links in your site, as long as you make it an obvious part of your site structure and navigation. Link to it from your regular navigation menu rather than trying to hide the links at the bottom of the page and use logical anchor text rather than "Link one, link two etc". The way you have it set up just reeks of dodgy link farm, even if that wasn't your intention.

Get rid of that tiny keyword stuffed text at the top and bottom of your page - that isn't helping you at all. If the keywords are important, then integrate them logically into your body text.

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Q and A: Why can't I see my favicon?

Dear Kalena...

I have my own domain and I created a favicon. I did all I was supposed to do but still can't see the ico. In Mozilla we can see it on our office computer, but on the two other computers we can't see it on Explorer. I hope after 1.5 days of brain-wrecking trying..... you have the ground breaking answer for me. http://www.mohawkmotel.ca/favicon.ico

Thanks from Canada

Shirley

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Shirley

Don't panic - I see it just fine in both Firefox and IE from here. What version of IE are you testing it on? I'm using IE 7. Have you bookmarked the site and refreshed the page? Try doing that on the computers where you can't see it and also try dumping your browser cache, your temporary Internet files and your visited page history and then relaunch your browser. I'm betting this will solve the problem.

Meanwhile, you have a more pressing problem with the site. What on earth are you thinking keyword-stuffing the top and bottom of your home page with tiny text? You can't tell me that text is there for humans to read. Aren't you aware that such retro spam can earn you ranking suppression penalties on the search engines? And then you add insult to injury by stuffing (nearly) hidden links leading to some type of link farm all along the bottom of the page.

Are you not aware that these techniques go against Google's published Webmaster Guidelines? It doesn't look as though Google has caught it yet, but be ready for your rankings to plummet if they do. Tsk Tsk!

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Q and A: How can I stop link farms from linking to us?

Dear Kalena...

I'm using Yahoo Site Explorer to check inlinks to client sites. On one site, I'm noticing inlinks from PR0 sites that are just listings of URLs and fake 'directories' that are there to pick up adsense dollars. They were not submitted by us or our client. My questions: Is there any way to remove your site from these types of pages? Do the owners ever honor any requests? Is there any way to minimize the impact of inlinks from sites like these?

Keri

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Keri

Thanks for the caffeine injection! Re your questions:

1) You can try. If you can find a way to contact them, ask them to remove the link. A good trick I learned is to look up the domain ownership details via a WhoIs lookup and cc your email to the admin, tech and registrant emails. That shows them that you are serious about your request and have done your research about them. Most likely they will ignore your request, but you never know.

2) I wouldn't worry too much. Google and other engines are good at filtering out links from low quality sites and any impact they have on your site's overall link popularity is minimal. However, if you find sites are duplicating chunks of your client's content using site scraping, that's considered an infringement of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and you can report this to Google via this link.

Overall, I wouldn't spend too much time concerned about either issue. As Google say on their own Webmaster Blog:

"Don't fret too much about sites that scrape (misappropriate and republish) your content. Though annoying, it's highly unlikely that such sites can negatively impact your site's presence in Google."

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Q and A: How can I get a top position in Google for my site?

Dear Kalena...

I am Verma from Mumbai. I submitted my site several times on GOOGLE. But I don't have any good results even my site is not listing on top 10 in google. So please can u send me some comments & Solutions . How can I get my site in google on top position...Please?

Verma

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Verma

Tsk Tsk. What a naughty site you have. And I'm not talking about the fact that it's advertising an escort service. I'm talking about the obvious spam techniques and search engine incompatibilities listed below:

• Keyword-stuffed, over-utilized Title Tag
• Excessive keyword repetition in META Keywords Tag
• Duplicate content in the both the Title Tag and META Description Tag
• Incorrect formatting of the Title Tag
• Multiple keyword-stuffed comment tags
  
• Multiple, keyword-stuffed nonsense META tags that are unsupported by any search engines
• Use of Flash in your HTML code placed above important text content
• Use of keyword-stuffed tiny text
• Hidden 1 x 1 pixel links
• Graphic navigation menu instead of text-based
• Use of low quality link farms to inflate link popularity
  
• Excessive use of flashing titty banners (ok this is not technically spam, but it should be!)

I could go on but I'd have to charge you a consulting fee. Nearly all these things go against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Still not sure why your site isn't ranking? You might also want to check out this post for info about recent changes to Google's algorithm that has affected sites containing adult content.

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Q and A: Does the definition of hidden text include different shades of the same color?

Dear Kalena...

I have a question about this which I read on a site:

"The most common spam I see is accidental. A webmaster innocently does something such as using white font in a colored table, when he happens to also have a page with a white background. From a search engine's point of view this is spamming because he has hidden text. You aren't allowed to have text the same color as your page background."

I understand her point about white and white. I have changed my background to pale blue but some of my text and all of my links are two dark shades of blue. Does she include different shades of the same shade of one color? I hope it would consider hidden text only as an identical color and shade of that color.

ContactLab

Kalena's Answer:

Dear ContactLab

The author of that quote is correct. It can be a problem for webmasters using tables, where if they have a white page background and a colored table, any white text in that table may trip a spam filter on a search engine on the look out for font the same color as the overall page background.

But I think search engine robots are getting more sophisticated these days and can probably detect if a table is being used within the code. To be on the safe side, I would avoid using text in a table on your site that is the exact same color as your page background. A shade or two difference should be fine as I believe the spider would be looking for an exact color code match, not similar shades of the same color.

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Q and A: Could purchasing and redirecting multiple domains to our main site hurt us from an SEO perspective?

Dear Kalena...

Management constantly wants to register new domain names based on new product line brand names. These domains will all end up pointing to specific product pages on our single corporate site. Could this hurt us from an SEO perspective? Would the better route be to use direct URLs such as www.corpsite.com/product-page ?

Thank you,

Leona

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Leona

Yes and double yes. There is absolutely no value in purchasing a unique domain name for each of your product lines, especially if you are only going to redirect those domains back to your main site anyway.

Search engines no longer give any ranking boost to keyword-stuffed domains and new domains are subject to an aging delay of up to 9 months before being included in Google's standard search results database so the pages wouldn't be found anyway. Plus, if you DO decide to redirect other domains to your main site and use META refresh as the redirect method, you can trip spam filters on some search engines and possibly have your site filtered or pushed further down in results pages.

Another disadvantage of using multiple domains is the fact that you dilute the link popularity of your existing site because some links would point to your other domains and not your main site. The best option to avoid all these hassles is to dedicate a page or series of pages on your main site to each product line and optimize those pages very thoroughly for the target search keywords relating to each unique product. You should also use a logical navigation structure when creating those product pages, for example if you were a jewelry site selling multiple products online, you could use something like this:

www.jewelrysite.com/rings/silver-rings.htm
www.jewelrysite.com/rings/gold-rings.htm
www.jewelrysite.com/necklaces/silver-chains.htm
www.jewelrysite.com/necklaces/gold-chains.htm
etc.

Using a logical navigation structure such as the above helps search engine spiders to easily find and index all your pages and it also aids usability for your site visitors. Now go and convince your managers quickly, before they sabotage your site's search engine visibility!
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Q and A: Is it considered black hat SEO to hide H1 tags within CSS?

Dear Kalena...

If you make H1 tags hidden by using the CSS method, do search engines like Google and Yahoo consider this black hat SEO? I've heard that using the colour method is definitely considered bad SEO but that wouldn't be used along with the CSS method. It was suggested to use the CSS method for our H1 tags we're creating for clients but I wasn't sure if it was something that would be safe to implement as part of our SEO set up for clients.

Demi

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Demi

It depends on the intent. If you are deliberately hiding tags in your CSS because you don't want search engines to find them, that's black hat, in my opinion. If there is a legitimate usability or design reason to put these tags in your CSS, then my feeling is it's ok.

However, Google's own staff recommend against using CSS to hide text so I would probably avoid it if you can.

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Campaigners Against Search Engine Spam Decide to Spam Their Message

If you've got an email address, chances are you've been sent email spam over the past 2 weeks by a group calling themselves OrganicSpam.com. Their message seems simple enough:

"We would like to draw your attention to the smoldering issue of search engine spam and click fraud being used to the advantage of search engines and the inaction by them in dealing with it. OrganicSpam.com is a venture created to act as a podium to fight against the fallacies of search engines and bring the internet community on a common pedestal to raise our voice against the ongoing exploitations".

But they've completely sabotaged their campaign by using email spam to distribute their message. How can they possibly consider being taken seriously? Spamming others about their crusade against spam is not only ludicrous but pretty hilarious when you think about it. Chances are that people who are pissed off about search engine spam are bound to be annoyed by email spam too, right? Duh!

They also don't seem to want people to know who they really are. There are no names on the website and they've used cloaked details for their domain registration. I have a suspicion who is behind such a dumb idea, but if any of you know for certain, please email me.

SEO Snake Oil Salesmen

I've been meaning to post this story for a while, but kept forgetting. It's the true story of a humble SEO consultant called Leann who uses white-hat techniques and runs a professional SEO business in the U.S. for small to medium business clients.

One day, Leann had a call from a client whom she's had for 3 years. It seemed this client had in turn received a call from a snake oil salesman claiming to be an "SEO expert" who told them that their website was "about to be banned in Google". When the client asked for more information, the seo snake oil sales guy told them that their site was "on a list to be banned due to link farm abuse". Now this rang some warning bells for the client because they knew that Leann was VERY careful about building links for the client and never used any Free For All or link farm techniques. Mr Snakeoil sent the client a link to a low quality links page where their site was listed (which Leann had never even heard of!).

The client asked if the caller worked for Google and he said no, but that he was certain the site was about to be banned and didn't want to see that happen. The client started to become concerned and so asked the salesman to contact their web developer and seo (Leann) directly to discuss the issue. The salesman refused, claiming that the client's web developer was the one causing the issue, did not have the client's best interests at heart and would not want to hear from him. Luckily, Leann's client became very suspicious at this point and simply ended the call quickly, forwarding the snake oil salesman's details on to Leann.

Not to be outdone, the salesman later emailed Leann's client citing the removal of BMW.de from Google's index as some sort of "proof" his claims were legitimate. When the client politely declined his services, Mr Snakeoil turned nasty, saying he was going to report the client to Google for link farming:

"I make sure to report you to Google for link farming. I’m sorry. Your website will be banned and you will not be able to be found on Google not even with your company name".

At this point, Leann's client had had enough and decided to ask Mr Snakeoil some specific questions about his service that any professional web developer or SEO could answer. He refused to answer, instead saying "Pay Me". Luckily the client wasn't fooled and alerted Leann to this guy's approach.

Be warned! These type of scammers use fear, threats and bribery to get your attention. Don't be fooled. You can read the whole sorry saga from Leann's perspective here.

Q and A: What's up with Google?

Dear Kalena...

I am seeing more and more bogus websites throughout! Just did a search for "aruba accommodation". There are tons of listings which come up. All identical except for the "name" of the "company". ALL are just advertisements. Is this the future of Google? Is this the future of search?

Lisa

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Lisa

Unfortunately, because so many millions of sites get added to their index each week, Google must rely on their spam filters to do most of the spam hunting instead of humans. Sometimes dodgy sites can temporarily dodge the filters.

But if you truly think a site goes against Google's published webmaster guidelines then use their Report a Spam Result form to suggest the site for a closer inspection by staff.

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Q and A: Why has my site been kicked out of Google?

Dear Kalena...

I was searching for reason of site to be out of google. And i landed up on this page.

I am not a good site optimizer, but i am trying to built up the network of some sites.
Everything was going fine. But one of my site was kicked out by google yesterday. URL of site is http://papers4india.com . It is not very old site but all of the sudden, all the pages of site are out of google. Please review the site and network sites.

I need your valuable suggestions. That would be a big help for me.

Regards
Ankur

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Ankur

Simple. Your site is offline and so is not available to ANY search engines. Better check with your site hosts.

[Addition - 2 hours later - well now I see your site is back up and is indeed missing from Google. From my quick glance, your site appears to be using excessive keyword repetition and keyword-stuffed comment tags. Better compare your site with Google's Webmaster Guidelines, get rid of the dodgy tactics and submit a reinclusion request pronto]

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Google Confirms TrafficPower Were Banned

In the second public "outing" of naughty web sites in the past week, Google has confirmed that SEO company TrafficPower and many of their client sites were banned from their index for breaking their webmaster guidelines. The Better Business Bureau has received over 100 complaints about TrafficPower in the past 36 months.

Matt Cutts, head of Web Spam at Google has given these reasons for going out on a limb to make an example of banned sites:

"I’ve found that it can assist webmasters to give concrete examples of violations of our quality guidelines.

This site is also useful because it allows me to give webmasters and site owners more information. For example, it lets me remind site owners of our search engine optimization (SEO) guidelines, which states that “you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire.” That means that if an SEO were to build doorway pages directly on your own domain, your site could be removed from Google as a result. For that reason, it’s important to do your research and to understand what actions an SEO company will be performing for you."

Good for Google for publicly confirming what most of us knew already. And congratulations to Aaron Wall who was just supplied with some heavy duty ammunition with which to fight his legal battle with TrafficPower.

Content thief with a conscience (or not)

Remember those content thieves I mentioned yesterday? Well, one of the site owners has emailed me to apologize and blame it all on his webmaster who has been spewing forth spammy doorways and cloaked content without his knowledge or permission. Apparently.

I wonder if this is the same webmaster who has suddenly decided it might be fun to inundate my online form with porn and pharmaceutical links? Things that make you go hmmm....

Rant of the Week: Content Thieves

I'm majorly p^$%& off today. I have just wasted my entire working morning sending "cease and desist" emails to a number of webmasters who thought it would be a good idea to reproduce snippets of my articles on their spammy doorway pages designed to trick search engines.

Not only did these losers simply use my copyright content without correct attribution to me or use of my clearly specified author resource box, but they decided use random chunks of my articles that only included the keywords they were targeting. These chunks make no sense at all to the reader and are merely utilized as filler for doorway pages containing excessive keyword repetition or AdWords ads relating to the offending keywords.

To make matters worse, some of these sites have used the 'ole bait and switch technique, getting their spammy doorways ranked high for target keywords and then immediately swapping the content to normal looking pages so they look legitimate. You can see an example of such deception here. Notice the difference between this cached version and the current version of the page. Google recently blacklisted BMW's German website for using similar cloaking tactics based on JavaScript redirects.

Thank heavens for the Google cache! I don't usually bother reporting spam, but I'm so incensed that I've been making good use of the Google spam report tool today.

Q and A: Why aren't our pages indexed by Google or Yahoo?

Dear Kalena...

Hello and thank you for your most interesting newsletter which we as a company subscribe to.

1. Is there any obvious reason why none of the pages linked to 'Miscellaneous' at the link below are indexed by Google or Yahoo. These help pages were created months ago.

http://www.lowercall.com/faq.html

E.g. type into google or yahoo 'lowercall linksys camera' and nothing comes up. Type the same thing into MSN and pages are indexed fine.

2. If you type 'cheap calls' into google, one of our competitors called has managed to get themselves on the front page.

When I look at the source code for this competitor's page, right at the bottom there is some HTML code which is new to me - can you explain what this code does and if it is a way of optimising a page to further enhance search engine ranking.

[ a href="gben-server-PageServer?ARTICLE=SEARCH.SO.CHEAPCALL" class="searchterms">Cheap calls[ /a]

Kind Regards

Michael

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Michael

I've checked and your "miscellaneous" page IS indexed by Google AND Yahoo. In fact, Google has indexed 97 pages of your site. At my end, the search query lowercall linksys camera triggers a single site listing in Google - yours.

Perhaps there was a database shuffle going on at the time of your most recent search? Regardless, it's there now. A good way to ensure all your pages are indexed regularly by Google is to use their SiteMaps submit tool.

Regarding your competitor, I took a look at the site in question and you're right, it does seem like they are doing something a bit dodgy. There's nothing spammy about the code they're using, it's simply a way to call their database and request different content to appear based on their various products and services.

However, a few things trigger alarm bells:

1) They have stuck a whole bunch of links at the bottom of the page containing keyword-stuffed anchor text. This smells of search engine spam.

2) For these links, they have used tiny font in a color that is almost the same as the page background. This suggests they don't want human visitors to see them and so again, it reeks of search engine spam.

3) Each of these links leads to what I would classify as a "doorway page", optimised for a particular keyword or phrase but containing very little original content. Hmmm this isn't looking good.

4) Each of these "doorway pages" links to each other, creating a type of internal link network.

No question about it. I would definitely classify this as search engine spam, and so it seems, would Google. On their Webmaster Guidelines page they say:

• Make pages for users, not for search engines.
  
• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches
• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank.
  

Your competitor is doing all these things. BUT, it doesn't look like Google's anti-spam filters have picked up on this, which may be why you are still seeing your competitor high in the rankings. My guess is that the site will sink like a stone once those blatant techniques are discovered and penalized via spam filtering.

I would just wait it out. Google will sort the wheat from the chaff eventually. Then again, maybe Google has bigger fish to fry. If you're concerned about it, you could always try bringing it to their attention by submitting a spam report.

[If you found this post helpful, you might benefit from downloading our free Search Engine Optimization lesson]

Assclown SEOs

I just can't help myself this week. Must give Matt another backscratch for assclown SEOs. Will the real Slim Shady SEO please stand up?

Q and A: Any more suggestions for getting reinstated in Google?

Dear Kalena...

Thanks for this post where you explained possible reasons why my site vanished from Google. After lots of work, I have cleaned up my site. Any more suggestions please?

Thanks,
Jamie

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Jamie

Just one suggestion: start again. I can't see any improvements at all. For one thing, there's absolutely no text on your home page and even the "HTML site" you offer as an alternative to Flash has no text either! The text currently on your services page would suffice as home page text. But before you do that, get reading so you know what needs to be done.

How to submit a Google site re-inclusion request

This week I stumbled upon a very useful post by Google staffer Matt Cutts. If you believe your site has been penalized or removed entirely from the Google index, and you've been wondering how to get it re-included, it's essential that you read this post.

Here's an extract:

"Fundamentally, Google wants to know two things: 1) that any spam on the site is gone or fixed, and 2) that it’s not going to happen again. I’d recommend giving a short explanation of what happened from your perspective: what actions may have led to any penalties and any corrective action that you’ve taken to prevent any spam in the future. If you employed an SEO company, it indicates good faith if you tell us specifics about the SEO firm and what they did–it assists us in evaluating reinclusion requests. Note that SEO and mostly-affiliate sites may need to provide more evidence of good faith before a site will be reincluded; such sites should be quite familiar with Google’s quality guidelines".

Additional info about today's post

After I made my post about keyword-stuffed domains today, I happened to stumble upon a post by Googler Matt Cutts in his blog. Apart from recommending people use hyphens (dashes) instead of underscores in their file names, Matt also had something interesting to say about hyphens in domains:

"To answer a common question, Google doesn’t algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url. Of course I can only speak for Google, not other search engines. And bear in mind that if your domain looks like www.buy-cheap-viagra-online-while-consolidating-your-debt-
so-you-can-play-texas-holdem-while-watching-porn.com, that may still attract attention for other reasons."

So looks like the automatic penalty for multiple dashes in a domain or page URL is just another SEO myth. But keyword-stuffed domains may attract unwanted attention from Google, so beware.

Q and A: Is there benefit in having multiple domains containing search keywords?

Dear Kalena...

I'm a web designer and I have many clients who register domain names that match their business name. This is great, but in many cases these domain names don't include their primary keyword. Is there benefit in having multiple domain names pointing to the same site and using the keyword included domain name for search engine registration? Is there any risk of duplicate content as you discussed in your September 05 newsetter?

Thank you - I find your newsletters very helpful and hope to complete one of you courses soon.

Cheers,
Nicole


Kalena's Answer:

Dear Nicole

Keyword-stuffed domains? No, nada, absolutely not. Sure, it used to be all the rage to register multiple domains containing as many keywords as possible all separated by hyphens. But this only ever gave sites a teeny tiny boost in the relevancy stakes, if any at all. And those days are long gone. Keyword-stuffed domains are now considered retro spam.

Nearly all current search engine algorithms filter out keywords within domain names and word has it that over-use of hyphens within a domain name can actually earn your site a penalty. Besides that, the experts agree that keyword-stuffed domains just look silly.

But thanks for providing our:

Retro Spam Tactic of the Week!

Q and A: Are we in the Google Sandbox?

Dear Kalena...

Having spent some time in an effort to get our site a good listing on Google I have now given up and started using Adwords. I am hoping that this is a short term thing and that in the long term I can improve our listings to the extent where I don't have to pay to be in the running with Google.

For some time I have suspected that there is something fundamentally wrong with the construction of the site. In the past we have spent many hundreds of pounds to a company that promised to get us a top 5 listing on Google (yes, I now know this cannot be promised by anyone!).

Today for the first time I learnt (from your site) about the Sandbox. Are we in the Sandbox?? Kalena I am a lost soul and need some help from a higher power! (That's you!)

Could you give me any guidance please? BTW I am aware we need to do some work on the site as the time users spend on the index page is very short, but I am juggling lots of missions!

Thanks Kalena, the site is fab and I learn day by day.

Best regards
Adrian

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Adrian

Regardless of whether your site is in the Sandbox, there is one big glaring problem that I can see on your site immediately. You use a META refresh to redirect all visitors from http://www.macoles.com/ to http://www.macoles.com/html/. What is the point of that?

META refreshes can be viewed as suspicious by search engines, because some spammers use them to pull the old "bait and switch" tactic. That is, advertise a certain type of content in the search engine listings but then redirect visitors to an entirely different site e.g. porn, gambling etc. I've also heard that META refreshes can cause problems for search bots trying to index your site. Some bots coming across refresh code will simply leave the site without indexing it.

According to this site, you should never use a META refresh on a page that you want indexed by search engines. It also states that Googlebot has trouble with pages that use a refresh time-out of "0" like yours does.

However having checked your site, I can see that:

1) Googlebot last cached it on November 16.
2) You have a Google Toolbar PageRank of 4/10 and 5 backward links.
3) Google has indexed 69 pages from your site.

So although Google may not currently have trouble with your META refresh, other engines might so I would trash it as soon as possible.

Regarding whether your site is in the Google Sandbox, I don't think it is. Why? Because a few searches for logical keyword phrases such as "self catering holidays Jersey" pulls up your site within the top 10. Sure your site doesn't rank highly for more competitive terms like "holiday cottages Jersey", but your poor link popularity probably has more to do with that. If your site was sandboxed, I wouldn't expect it to rank well for any of your target phrases.

So Adrian, if you want to boost your search engine rankings, get rid of that horrible META refresh, get to work increasing the links pointing to your site from related high quality sites and keep adding fresh content.

Q and A: Why has my site vanished from Google?

Dear Kalena...

Me Too. I have had my site for nearly ten years and have been listed very well with Google since they began. A few weeks ago I vanished. Below is a copy of an email to Google. Please do not mention my web URL. Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Jamie

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Jamie

You are kidding right? You REALLY don't know why your site has disappeared? Looks like Google has actually banned your site from their index and I don't blame them. Why do I think it's banned? The site isn't cached by Googlebot, shows a Toolbar PageRank of zero, it has no backward links and no pages indexed.

Why don't I blame them? Because the site uses many of the retro spam tactics that were popular back in the 90s:

• Keyword-stuffed Title Tags
• Keyword-stuffed META Description Tags
• Keyword-stuffed META Keyword Tags
• Keyword-stuffed Alt Image attributes
  
• Multiple doorway pages (consider your index1.htm, p1975.htm and p2197.htm as three of many examples)
  
• Duplicate content on many pages
  
• A cross-linked internal directory of over 1,000 pages (while not necessarily spammy, could be seen as an attempt to artificially inflate your link popularity).
  

The list goes on. Oh and the bulletin board you said you deleted in your email to Google is still alive and well and ranking in Yahoo (see /anyboard9/forum/index.html). This forum alone could have earned you the Google penalty. I could be wrong, but to me it reeks of fake posts in a misguided attempt to boost your traffic and rankings.

Looks like you've got some serious rebuilding to do Jamie. Start here.

And thanks for playing:

Name That Retro Spam!

Q and A: Isn't this duplicate content?

Dear Kalena...

Following your column of November 7, where you quote Google's guidelines, "Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content"...

Was wondering your thoughts on how Google allows these as their number 1 and number 2 rankings as search results for "aruba pictures":

http://www.arubatravelinfo.com/pictures.html
http://www.arubatravelinfo.com/photos.html

Lisa

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Lisa

I wouldn't call those pages duplicates. Far from it. They have a similar theme, but the layout is different, the text is different and the images are different.

That said, I have seen a lot of pages in Google SERPs that should be considered duplicates. Some of these are still ranking well. It just depends how long it takes for Google's sp@m filters to find them and filter out the duplicate. It might not seem fair, but with their content database as large as it is, Google is managing pretty well, considering.

If ever you see Google results you think go against their own webmaster guidelines, you can always submit a Spam Report.

Q and A: Has my site been penalized?

Dear Kalena...

In the past 3 days, my website has gone from the top 3 ranking positions all the way to #35 or below. Have I been penalized? Partially penalized?

Specifically, the website used to rank #3 for the term "hip hop samples" for the past six months. Plus, it ranked in the top 4 for several other terms like "fruity loops samples" and "free hip hop samples" etc.

FYI... most of the other competitor sites' rankings for the same terms "hip hop samples" & "fruity loops samples" have remained unchanged while www.modernbeats.com has plummeted.

Kind Regards,
Liam

Kalena's Answer:

Hi Liam

Your site has a Google Toolbar PageRank of 5, plus 68 backward links and Google has indexed nearly 200 pages of your site, so a manual penalty seems unlikely. Have you made a lot of changes to your site lately? Specifically, have you added visible or anchor text for your target phrases? My guess is your site has been sandboxed for competitive terms . See this post for more info.

In terms of your site's search engine compatibility, I can see some glaring issues there:

1) Your home page contains no visible body text apart from visitor testimonials at the bottom. How do you expect search engines to consider your site to be relevant for search queries for your target keywords if you don't actually use those keywords in your body text?

2) Your Title Tag appears to be a little long and not optimized for peak ranking performance or usability. It should ideally be a logical and grammatically correct sentence of 9 or 10 words, incorporating important keywords. Remember that people will see this title in the Favorites list if they bookmark your site.

3) Your META Description Tag is not formatted correctly and appears to be simply a bunch of keywords strung together. Again, this tag should be a grammatically correct sentence or two, incorporating your important keywords in a logical way. People may well see this description of your site in the search engine results pages so it should be enticing enough for them to click on.

4) You are using a technique with your Alt Img attributes that is almost certainly tripping search engine sp@m filters. What you have on your site is one of the worst cases of keyword-stuffed Alt tags that I've ever seen! Your Alt tags should be used to logically describe the images that exist on your site. They were developed primarily to allow accessibility to visually impaired visitors, not as some secret way to trick search engines.

And on that note, you've earned our:

Retro Spam Tactic of the Week!